REFUSE

Creative Statement – REFUSE

I am making large scale works depicting black plastic trash bags. Although I have explored this subject before in monochromatic charcoal drawings, I am revisiting it with oil paints under highly saturated color lighting conditions. In general, I maintain an interest in the dialectics between representation and abstraction on a two-dimensional surface, watching artists play with this idea throughout history in the portrayal of textiles and fabric. While black plastic trash bags are not textiles, they share the appearance of a thin sheet that can flex and conform into myriad abstract shapes. It intrigues me how flat things bend and fold into volumetric objects and can retain that illusion when they become planar again on the surface of the painted substrate. Thus, the work is in part a meditation on depth and flatness, “plastic” and decorative space. 

The black plastic trash bag is deeply emblematic of the Anthropocene and its endemic environmental crises. The bags are petroleum products made from polyethylene, which makes them non-renewable and non-biodegradable. They can take decades to break down, and then only into smaller microplastics that can disperse and endure indefinitely. The black color is achieved by adding carbon black, a substance produced by the incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons, which not only prolongs the life of the bag, but is also a pigment with a foundational relationship to the visual arts in areas such as drawing, painting, and printmaking. As disconcerting as the implications of these bags can be, they have significant utility inside and outside the studio, and they have a slick and shiny appearance that is not altogether unpleasant to me.

Which is an apt segue to another continuing theme in the form and content of my work being the conceptual tensions facilitated between attraction and repulsion. The colorful rendering and size of the paintings is meant to represent an alluring manifestation of desire in contrast to the abject generally reserved for black plastic trash bags, things that may be diseased, rotting, or otherwise unbearable. The potentially nefarious and/or repulsive contents are both physically and psychologically contained, separated, and hidden away within the safety of the bag’s sterilized plastic membrane and the vibrancy of the painted surface. In this way, I hope the work is a metaphorical breeding ground for meditations on pillars of the human condition related to our embodied relationships with sex, death, shame, grief, loss, pleasure, and pain. The title for the body of work, REFUSE, is ambiguously political in that it could refer to garbage or to an act of resistance, and I relish the mild transgression of placing trash on the walls we reserve for the perceived sanctity of Art.